The Social Technology Spectrum

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Social media technologies are massively confusing today. Not because they aren’t powerful or capable of substantially benefitting your organization, but because there are so many to choose from…

During my research while writing my book, Social Media Metrics Secrets (Wiley, 2011) and through countless interviews with social media practitioners and leading vendors in the industry, I developed a categorization schema for understanding social media technologies. I call this the Social Media Technology Spectrum. Across this spectrum, there are five primary functions that businesses can accomplish with social media technologies:

Discover > Analyze > Engage > Facilitate > Manage

While, I go into great detail about each category in the book, I’ll offer an overview here:

The Engagement Platforms (Engagement/Workflow) Vendors in this category extend their Social Analytics capabilities to include workflow delegation and engagement capabilities from directly within the interface, it places more controls at the fingertips of your internal business users. Example Engage vendors include: Crimson Hexagon, Hootsuite, Objective Marketer, Collective Intellect, and many more.

The Hosting and Facilitation Tools (Social Platforms) If you need to offer your community a social media destination like a user group, a forum, or a designated social media website. That’s where the Social Facilitation technologies provide a platform that can facilitate the conversation, the dialogue and the learning experience. Example Facilitate vendors include: Mzinga, Pluck, Ning, Lithium, Jive, Telligent and many more.

The Management Solutions (Social Management) This group of technology offerings includes social customer relationship management tools, internal collaboration solutions, and social media aggregation services that enable businesses to manage their social media efforts in an orchestrated way. Example Manage vendors include: BatchBook, Flowtown, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer and many more.

As you can see, each category has associated vendors. While there is certainly some cross-over here, there is also a lot more depth to each of the categories. For each category, you can delve deeper by specific social media channel (i.e., there’s a whole cast of Social Analytics tools specifically for Twitter). Yet, in a technology environment that is so cluttered with options and new entrants, I feel that some categorization is merited.

But what do you think? … Am I on the right track here? Do you use technologies from multiple categories? …What did I miss?

4 Comments

The management solutions I would call it social CRM Solutions in the analysis technologies don’t forget about data driven tools that focus on setecting patterns in text data( sentiment analysis) and tools that link the social data with other web and offline data sources

Thanks for your comment. Yes, my category of management is very close to Social CRM, but I intentionally avoided that term because I believe that social is not just a flavor of CRM, but in fact an integral part. Salesforce.com is making this a reality as they continue to build out and acquire social technologies to add to the business intelligence and sales support functions. Further, I envision this category not merely as a means to manage your social customers, but also to manage your employees using social technologies.

Regarding linking social data with other sources: certainly there many technologies that make this possible. In fact, I’ve worked closely with IBM and Teradata to conceptualize the concept of True Profiles within customer data warehouses. Yet, I still see these capabilities as a data integration elements rather than true social technologies.

Yet, you bring up a good point in that the technology stack is quite large and there’s lots to consider. Cheers, John

John Lovett is a long time digital analytics industry veteran who leads the Strategy Practice at Analytics Demystified. John has audited and evaluated dozens of enterprise analytics organizations and helps transform their practices from status quo to best-in-class analytical organizations. His work has affected change in overarching strategies, process, reporting, governance, and team development. Prior to joining Analytics Demystified, John was a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research where he led the Analytics and Optimization practice. John served as the President of the Digital Analytics Association and is a tireless evangelist for the digital analytics industry. John is a highly rated presenter on analytics and digital marketing topics and the author of Social Media Metrics Secrets (Wiley 2011).